A humanitarian organization said on Wednesday that 10.3 million people have been displaced from their homes by climate change disasters such as floods and droughts in the past six months, most of them in Asia.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said that about 2.3 million others were displaced by conflict in the same period, indicating that the vast majority of internal displacement at the moment was due to climate change.
Helen Brent, migration and displacement coordinator for the Asia-Pacific region at ITU, said that although the data covers only a six-month period from September 2020 through February 2021, it highlights an accelerating global trend of climate-related displacement.
"Things are deteriorating, as climate change exacerbates existing factors such as poverty, conflict and political turmoil," she added.
The report said that about 60 percent of the internally displaced due to climate change in the past six months were in Asia.
Scientists from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center said an average of 22.7 million people are displaced each year. This figure includes displacement due to geophysical phenomena such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, but the vast majority were due to weather-related events.
Globally, the number of displaced people reached 17.2 million in 2018 and 24.9 million in 2019. The 2020 numbers were not fully available yet, but the center's mid-year report revealed that 9.8 million were displaced due to natural disasters in the first half of last year.
A report by the Institute for Economics and Peace revealed last year that more than a billion people are expected to be forced to migrate by 2050 due to conflict and environmental factors.
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